Supporting a Critical Moment for Health in Kenya: Building a National Data Platform

In 2025, restlessness within the global external funding landscape that had long been fomenting ruptured. Marked by sharp decreases in external funding, largely due to the disbandment of USAID and other United States government (USG) funding channels, several critical healthcare projects in Kenya faced severe disruptions to life-saving care, particularly programs focused on malaria, TB and HIV.

A 2021 report from the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health highlighted that aid to Kenya’s health sector accounts for about a third of total ODA to the county, with funding from USG forming the greatest proportion of assistance received, giving the example of 2017, where USG funding accounted for 62% of all health ODA Following the funding freezes, a 2025 report by CEMA (Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis) details these drops, showing stark drop-offs in external funding across both on-budget and off-budget 2024/25 and 2025/26 funding cycles, with external funding dropping by over half in the 2025/26 financial year. Based on this report, USG support constituted 59% of total external funding for health in Kenya in the 2024/25 year before the abrupt cuts in early 2025.

Globally, the ongoing trend of declining donor and external funding in the health sector had already set alarm bells ringing across organizations and governments whose work depended on these inputs for many years before the shocks experienced in 2025.

Governments in the global South, including Kenya, have grown increasingly aware of the need to raise more domestic funds and decouple from dependence on foreign support. Despite their best efforts to plug the gaps they left by declining funding, the reality is that there is limited fiscal space to grow national and county budgets. Thus, most governments have set their sights on tackling inefficiencies in service delivery that could have otherwise been diverted towards more and better health services. However, the size and source of this waste is difficult to quantify in data-opaque health and finance systems, resulting in governments “flying blind” while planning, in many cases, making the situation worse.

Evidence-based decision making is nearly impossible to do without access to and the ability to translate data into meaningful insights.

Kenya, as a trailblazer in the digital space among its neighboring countries, has made concerted efforts to address data governance in health to strengthen the health ecosystem and improve health planning. The flagship Digital Health Act (2023) set the foundation for the role of data and technology in the health space while legitimizing the Digital Health Authority, mandated to transform the health system through innovative technology solutions. Yet, there are still several gaps in operationalising a robust system that can fully engender not just data availability, but rigorous and well-established data use practices and behaviour. Several discrepancies and inaccuracies in existing data, such as that found on KHIS, limit its usefulness. Further, data is fragmented and siloed, preventing full-bodied

analysis across key metrics. Certain methodologies and frameworks, such as NHAs (National Health Accounts) and PETS (Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys), provide valuable data towards identifying challenges, bottlenecks and other inefficiencies in how funds flow, but are not conducted often enough to support timely decision making, with data often representing a landscape in retrospect.

SGHI, in collaboration with the Kenyan government and with support from the Gates Foundation, is developing a digital public infrastructure for health planning (DPI-HP) solution that aims to link financial data with health service data, presenting a holistic picture of the health system for more effective planning. By design, the platform ends up addressing the challenge of data availability, robustness, and use in the health sector. A somewhat novel concept that draws on existing evidence and design principles around digital public infrastructure that goes beyond the technology as a platform, but also changes behaviour in data collection and evidence use for greater transparency. SGHI in partnership with key government health institutions is working to deliver a provisionally named DPI-HP (Digital Public Infrastructure for Health Planning), whose aim will be to improve the visibility of health spending and service delivery data at all levels of government; enable counties and the national government to conduct real-time planning, budgeting, and performance monitoring using integrated data and drive and support equity in resource allocation and incentivize improvements in health outcomes through data-driven decisions.

This will serve as a common data platform for the representation of analytics around critically indexed metrics and indicators, taking into consideration key users' particular needs, ranging from data for high-level reporting requests from senior ministry officials to day-to-day operational decision-making by county-level executives. This platform will continue to respond to the fundamentals of what an effective DPI platform should comprise across the three key building blocks, alongside the incorporation of other relevant principles that are in continuous development across the community of DPI practitioners and implementers. SGHI will detail its approach to this work in a post blog series capturing the logic behind the design and the observation in rolling out this solution, focused on the technical architecture and platform development, health financing analysis, public finance management, value for money, and health sector coordination. Each of these has been carefully outlined to incorporate considerations for valuable analytics of key metrics defining each of their respective topic area concerns.

The Technical Architecture and Platform Development component forms the basis of the platform, tasked with developing a solid informatics foundation that maintains adherence to international standards of data exchange. Health Financing Analysis focuses on mapping national and county data to model NHA and PETS metrics, as well as incorporating data across service delivery for key programs such as RMNCAH, HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria and key NCDs, while Public Finance Management covers analytics across budgeting, allocations and expenditure for health at national and county levels. Value for Money answers the question of how we can do more with the funding that’s already available; how we can optimize service delivery to ensure that each shilling is stretched to its fullest purchasing capacity, especially in consideration of the desired impact being achieved or not.

Finally, Health Sector Coordination quantifies the real and hidden costs of Kenya's coordination approach: how much these efforts actually cost, where they are being duplicated and what dependencies and transition risks are being created. Keep an eye out for the next instalment in this series, where we will share insights into how the technical architecture of the platform was designed.